GoSave: next generation piggy banks.

AU$ 54,832

118

GoSave: next generation piggy banks that help make saving and chores fun.

GoSavers are smart piggy banks with an intuitive touch screen and an iOS and Android application that help you teach your child about savings, rewards, goals, chores and financial literacy.

Update! We're off to the finals of VISA's Everywhere Initiative

When most of us were growing up we had piggy banks, got an allowance, or were rewarded for chores - but today, when so many of us don’t carry cash, it’s harder than ever to teach kids about the value of money.

GoSavers are digital piggy banks that kids will love using. With GoSave kids can see how much money they've saved, what chores have been set for them, get notified of rewards or gifts from family members and work their way toward specific savings goals.

Why GoSave?

Financial experts agree that the younger we teach kids about saving the better, with some reports saying children’s financial habits for life are formed as young as 7.*

There are a lot of reasons we don't save enough and it is a complex area of study but one of the simple reasons is that we don't make it a habit. We believe that making the process of earning and saving fun and tangible encourages children (and us as parents) to keep savings top of mind and form a regular savings habit early in a child's life.

Small change can make a big difference.

If you're saving for your child's future and teaching them about saving along the way, it's amazing how much even a small amount can add up over time. As an example we like to encourage people who often aren't in the habit to start saving $5 per day as this can really add up. e.g. If you do this from when your child is born it adds up to $32,500 by the time they're 18 (even without any taking compound interest or investment in any financial products).

As mentioned above a small, regular contribution to your child's saving account via an allowance (or pocket money) is a great way to get started and demonstrate the benefits of regular habitual saving. The GoSave app lets you create a recurring daily, weekly, or monthly allowance that your child can watch grow over time.

Set chores for financial rewards

Not every chore needs a financial reward, but often parents do this to encourage the notion that ‘hard work pays off’. According to the long-running Harvard Grant study*, there’s a strong correlation between children who completed chores as a child and success later in life. Further research shows that both saving and chores teach valuable lessons like the value of patience, hard work, delayed gratification and that setting and achieving goals helps kids build confidence.

Set goals

In addition to chores, goals play an important role in teaching children how to delay gratification and work toward a specific target or achievement. With the GoSave app you can talk to your kids, and together set a financial goal that really excites them. It might be a new bike, a holiday, or something altruistic like donating $100 to a charity they believe in - the choice is entirely up to you.

Help manage spending

Inevitably your kids will want to buy something and make withdrawals from their account too. The GoSave app let's you visualize and approve this spending from your mobile device and discuss with them. For more information about how GoSave accounts work see Setting Up GoSave, section below.

Get a little help from your family and friends.

Often grandparents, aunties, uncles and other family members want to give a financial gift and with GoSave they can without needing to send cash in the post. Simply invite them to download the GoSave app and they'll be able to send customized messages and amounts to your child's account.

Works like a good old fashioned piggy bank too.

We didn't think there was any harm in letting GoSave function like a good old piggy bank either. Each character has a coin slot Astro in his backpack, Uma in the top of her crest, and Penny in her back.

Coins added manually show up in your child's account balance on your app.

Setting up GoSave

The GoSave app helps you achieve all of the above and is quick and easy to set-up.

Option 1: Use any account. You can use any existing savings account and use GoSave to mirror the balance of that account. Using this option at the end of the month, GoSave notifies you how much you’ve transferred (i.e promised) and sends you a reminder to put that amount in the savings account. This means you’ll never forget to save regularly and your kids will benefit from the power of compound interest over time.

Option 2:Create a GoSave account (US Customers Only). If you’re in the US you will be able to set up a new account with us directly and use that as the savings account. It is FDIC insured and powered through our banking partnership with a leading financial intermediary that handles all the security, transactions and more. Note: This feature will be enabled shortly after shipping with Option 1 available first and will require a legally verifiable sign-up process.

Money vs Stars

For some children, particularly younger children, a Star Chart can be more motivating than money. Our current roadmap favours savings but over time we’ll add a feature that lets you award stars rather than money. This additional feature lets you teach many of the same lessons but using a system that you can completely customize.

The GoSavers

Astro the Astronaut

Uma the Unicorn

Penny the Pig

Security

The app and the device are both secured with 256K encryption, protecting your and your child’s data at all times. In the US we will be following COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection) compliance and follow similar standards around the world. When GoSave accounts are available too each will be FDIC insured to the value of $250,000 and secured by our US banking partner.

Using GoSave Responsibly

GoSave has been designed to help you start the conversation about money and chores with your children, but not to replace the conversation. The research shows that by actively explaining key concepts like saving, interest, debt and budgets, parents will significantly increase the overall financial literacy of their children.*

We also encourage parents of be mindful of over reliance on the device and to discontinue using it for periods of time if children are becoming too fixated on earning rewards.

A commonly requested feature during our beta tests has been the ability to deduct money from the child’s savings however we're undecided on this with our current preference to use positive reinforcement only.

Where We Are Today

We’re parents. We know that raising children is hard, especially in a fast paced technological world. We feel that teaching the skills for long term independence through financial security also translates into confidence and future prosperity.

We know that the world doesn’t necessarily have to revolve around money, however having the financial means to explore life without the stresses of living paycheck to paycheck is a worthy life mission, for our kids and yours.

What the future might hold

We’re starting with three GoSave characters, and aim to build up a range of fun, personable characters, and over time giving each character a bit more personality, sounds and customised features.

It’s not hard to imagine that we might be able to support cryptocurrency one day and we’ve also been thinking of ways we could interact with other smart home devices so you could transfer money with Alexa, or blink the lights green when the kids get a gift from a family member.

Another idea on the roadmap is integrating with a service like IFTTT to trigger savings rewards based on activity monitored by other smart devices - e.g. if your child has a FitBit and achieves their goal that could trigger a savings reward.

In future we might even be able to auto assign chores, so when the dishwasher stops it could add that automatically to your kids chores list - the sky is the limit :)

The Design Process

When we initially started thinking about GoSave we thought we’d only create one character. The more we spoke to families and fellow parents the clearer it became that we needed to create a few different options to choose from. This ended up costing us a more than we anticipated but we’re really happy with the results and love that we can give kids the choice of three different characters.

Note you can see the screw holes and join lines on some versions of our prototypes, these will be filled in on the production versions to ensure a more polished appearance.

The GoSave App

The GoSave iOS and Android apps are now both in development. With the app you'll be able to manage multiple accounts, personalise with photos, set-up allowances (or pocket money) for each child, set savings goals for each child, approve withdrawal requests, set recommended chores, verify they've been completed and much more.

Tech Specs

Why We Need Your Support

We need help from like minded parents. If you believe in our mission and love our unique approach, please back our project and bring this product to life.

We have

Designed and prototyped the first three GoSaving characters: Astro, Uma and Penny.

Developed the GoSave app for parents

Developed the interaction on device

We need to

Tool up for mass manufacturing

Get FCC and CE certification

Set up distribution and sales channels

Collect feedback from parents around the world

Team GoSave

Andrew Birt - CEO & Founder.

Andrew is a dad of two (Toby 3 and Rose 4 weeks) and interested in building consumer products. In 2012 Andrew founded LIFX a project that was born on KickStarter and now a leading brand in the smart home market. He was also part of the team behind CliniCloud a smart stethoscope and thermometer company that builds FDA certified medical products. Both LIFX and CliniCloud delivered to backers successfully and are now stocked in key retailers around the world.

Jason Ko - CTO & Founder

Jason is a dad of almost two (Sophie 2, with another on the way) an engineer and a product developer. Jason is the founder of Moduware a platform for modular IoT devices and previously served as the CEO of Speedshield Technologies and serves on the board of ASX listed Sensen Networks Ltd

Ameer Haider - VP Engineering

Ameer is a dad of two (Zahra 2.5 and Zainab 3 months) is an engineer and software developer with a passion for building iOS and Android apps. Ameer has built 100s of apps in his capacity as founder of a professional app development company and leads the GoSave software and application teams.

Tyler Mathes - CMO

Tyler is a dad of two (Mila 6, Jack 4) marketer and entrepreneur with deep experience in consumer brands. Tyler started his career at Pioneer Electronics, then moved to Bang&Olufsen as head of marketing for Australia & New Zealand. He has since created a number of companies of his own, including Fun Drum that successfully delivered their product to backers last year.

Craig Hynes - VP Strategy

Craig is a dad of two and successful fin tech entrepreneur having founded two of Australia's leading payment processing companies, Optal and eNett, most recently serving as General Manager of eNett until 2016. Craig has since invested and advised a number of fin tech companies and will lead our international growth.

Brad Grimshaw - Business Development

Brad is a dad of two (Luka 8, Leah 6) and worked for LIFX and another leading Australian IoT firm Creator Global. Brad leads our distribution, logistics and our relationships with retail and distribution partners that want to work with us to bring GoSave to their part of the world.

Dr. Katherine Griffith Clinical Psychologist

Katherine is a mum of one (Henri, 1) and practicing clinical psychologist. Katherine’s doctorate thesis was on the formation of relationships between autistic adults and her areas of practice are across a wide range of clinical clients, positive psychology and early learning.

Risks and challenges

Risks & Challenges

Manufacturing delay

We have significant experience in developing, manufacturing, consumer products having run founded and companies like LIFX, Speedshield Technologies, and Moduware. The tooling process for our 3 characters and is the longest exercise, and we will be using existing factories that we’ve previously engaged on other projects. To further derisk manufacturing we’re using a high quality display sourced from an Android handset. This reduces our development costs and time to market without compromising quality. It also means we don’t have to write firmware and develop custom boards which is costly and risky.

Certification

All products with electronics require certain levels of certification. We have certified products from LIFX, Speedshield Technologies, and Moduware and deeply understand the certification process.

Quality control

First the first batch of products, both founders will be in China supervising the production. Manufacturing partners have been selected based on prior personal experience with each founder.

Software

As time goes on, we will continue to develop new features and refine existing ones. Whilst we’ll do what we can in testing, as with all things software, some bugs may go through to the keeper. We’re committed to identifying and rectifying any software issues and welcome any assistance with testing from the Kickstarter group.

Logistics

Logistics for consumer products can be complicated but we believe that our experience should hold us in good stead. We will be using Shipwire to manage distribution fulfilment, however pre-order campaigns through online we will manage directly with a local Chinese fulfilment company.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge AU$ 10,000 or more
About US$ 6,878

Custom Character

We can design a customer GoSave character for you. Tell us what type of character you'd like to see and we'll develop a round of sketches and custom build (and name) your character for you! Note we can't breach any existing licensing deals or make something inappropriate but we're happy to make a replica of your cat.